Military Strategists Have Known for 2,500 Years that Prolonged Wars Are Disastrous

2,500 hundred years ago, one of the greatest military strategists ever - Sun Tzu - said:

"What is essential in war is victory, not prolonged operations."

"No nation has ever benefited from a prolonged war."

"Now,
when an army of one hundred thousand is raised and dispatched on a
distant campaign, the expenses borne by the people together with
disbursements of the treasury will amount to a thousand pieces of gold
daily. In addition, there will be continuous commotion both at home and
abroad, people will be exhausted by the corvee of transport, and the
farm work of seven hundred thousand households will be disrupted."

"A thousand pieces of gold" is a metaphorical, not set, amount. The costs of today's wars are actually much higher than a ton of gold per day.

Comment viewing options

War is difficult to understand. Most people only know the wars they see in the theater - and the reality of war is kind of unspeakable. In any case - it destroys the mentality of apple pie and barbecues and replaces it with something very nasty.

I agree. You can't look at a fiscal cost, and a multi-thousand year old saying, and then draw a sound conclusion from it.

Although many arguments can be made about the relationships between war and capital, it is the person who understands the most about these two things that really does not understand either of them at all.

Again in the post itself and all the comments not a single word about any of our victims. I hear cost, strategy, redistribution and everything else but not one word about the thousands of souls deprived of their lives. Americans generally are so brainwashed sick it's difficult to watch or believe. I suggest you share in the murderous crimes of your overlords.

The capacity of the human mind to create and perpetuate polarities has been exploited to create artificial rivalries and hatreds -- all of which would fall as so many pieces of debris if the perpetuation of the high polarity mental state were not so induced, perpetuated and exploited much as an operating system is disrupted by a virus or outside force. The natural human state is harmony and Peace -- it take serious programming and high polarity induction to create what we have now. Its as much a projection of an unsatisfied minds as it is a general conceptual meme perpetuated and induced by the very system enthroned at this time based on false concepts of Life. The average person would have no part of such crap -->

A logistics line that goes half way around the world by air? Imagine the fuel we could save by just putting an end to the war. What would that do to the cost of oil? But wait, what would we do with the hundreds of thousands of military and mercenary armed warriors returning to our Country? Now you know why there is no end to these wars, maybe even a new one brewing.

On the contrary, our government (and the private bankers who finance these wars and profit) have learned oh so well. It is just a question of how long they can continue to milk the American taxpayer out of every penny he has. Once that process has been complete, the supranational private bankers will then create a new Empire in the world (probably China) and we will declare the US Empire, just like the former British Empire, dead. The bankers, like a pack of hungry locusts, will descend upon the new Empire and incent them into various wars to continue the raping and pillaging into time without end.

But without a prolonged war and boogieman how will the military industrial complex (I suppose less industrial now) consume an ever increasing % of the people's labors? What 1.5+ trillion a year to protect us from men in caves and mystery packages, yeah I'm sure we are getting our moneys worth...

True, end the FED and your problems are solved. The FED is the key. If they have to pay for wars with gold, then they would not fight them because they don't have the gold. Wars are expensive. Borrowing "money" to pay for wars has been the bane of our existence for 300 years, maybe longer.

We have to keep our last productive domestic industry alive, the military-industrial complex. It would be much easier to have real industry, but that would force our leaders to admit that their current economy is nothing more than a sham.

Actually, the speech was delivered twice that day. The first reading was in a closed session with senior representatives of the House and Senate, wherein the warning was worded as to the "Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex".The cries emitting from the congressional members were so intense, the threats so grave as to future relations between the legislative and administrative entities, that the public delivery was modified to "Military-Industrial Complex" (Public record)

How important is the "War" to the domestic politics of the upcoming mid-term elections? Has the protest against the "War" become just so much background noise? Will these mid-term elections remind anyone of 1968?

One thing is for certain. A few months from now, (mainly because I predict this time it won't take long) many of the American people who thought that there would be some changes made to bolster this country, will be mad as hell and perhaps they will finally realize that the vote matters not, because the system itself is compromised and both parties are for all intents and purposes controlled by the same people and , there is no difference therefore, in this abstract notion known as political parties. Someone asked me the other day, are you are democrat or a republican. I told them, I am an American damn it.

Yes... in the days when wealth creation was fairly limited, so was the capacity to wage war.

Now, when we have much greater wealth creation, the elites can afford to waste more of it over a longer period to effect an domestic transfer of wealth from everyone else to themselves.

But even the US is finally hitting a wall. We just can't create enough wealth to cover the outgoings of our current conflicts, as well as all the debt accumulated from previous conflicts and government spending.

It's been a good several decades for the MIC and the bankers. But the party is coming to an end.

Oh well there's always the "other, an other and the other" solution. When one war gets too long, just invade another conveniently located country so that there's a "new and better" package, same old shit just expanded war. Accompanied by lots of false flags, propaganda and distractions.

For example. Today's WaPost had an Op-Ed about why its a good idea to invade Iran; rally the populace around a shrinking violet of a Messiah, goose the economy, just like FDR did. (Washington Post, today's Op-Ed.... not my thoughts, just the messenger here.) You know, to soften up the slave class to grovel up support for them to give their children to the false enemy so they don't have to worry about passing along any debt to anyone 'cause there'll be nobody left....er, maintain their freedoms.

Or get a few friends and partners (remember, as of yesterday, we have no allies) to help us with the whateverthefuck it is that we're doing (likewise, there's is no war on terror anymore) like maybe the ever so helpful French'll send and aircraft carrier to the gulf. (One's on the way, lickitey split, hands above head, no doubt)

Maybe even up the score, push harder, redouble the efforts by secretly transferring most of the military's special forces teams in Yemen (which is an anagram for enemy, by the way) to the CIA's control. (As per the front page of today's WSJ. Well, so much for subtlety.)

Whole lotta meaningless bullshit left to do in order to fight a new and improved war so as not to fight the same war (which however these days is not a war but nobody's sure what the fuck it is and no 3 people can explain to one another satisfactorily.)

WTF. Just spin the PR bottle and we'll all keep taking off our clothes till we look like the Beloved Emperor King.

No problem. Change the name and we're all ready home again right where we started.

This very a.m. on CNBS, the fealty brigade were discussing what stocks historically performed the best in the days post terrorism scares..... etc. Yesseriee, never worry your little head Martha, war can be very profitable and even we can get in on it, too!

Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote a book after he retired. It begins like this:

""WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.""

murderers are not amenable to reason or non-sociopathic logic. hence their blood thirst is never sated....obama is a murderer. bush is a mass murderer....the usa has no business in the middle east except to visit destruction upon itself....

Without public debate and without congressional hearings, a segment of the Pentagon and fellow travelers have embraced a doctrine known as the Long War, which projects an "arc of instability" caused by insurgent groups from Europe to South Asia that will last between 50 and 80 years. According to one of its architects, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just "small wars in the midst of a big one."